"We did it ourselves."

The last time I taught a formal class on Leadership, one of the students withdrew because he wanted to read and discuss famous leaders and that was not how the class was structured. Certainly, there are lessons to be learned by studying individual leaders, but when I teach about leadership I actually have the opposite goal – to broaden our perspective of leadership and be able to see it as a dynamic relationship between the ‘leader’, the ‘follower’ and the situation.

Have you ever stood up in front of an audience or a class and tried to engage them in the presentation or in a class activity only to have the entire room sit and stare at you? If you have then you know that you are only as good a presenter or teacher as the interaction with the audience or class allows you to be. The same is true of leadership. It’s possible to have great leadership skills and then find yourself in a situation in which the followers stand in front of you with their arms folded (sometimes literally) and dare you to make a difference. The hard truth is that the leader can have great ideas, but if no one else thinks they’re great and no one goes to the trouble to try and implement these fine ideas, nothing will happen.

It’s intriguing to observe how this works. At the large staff meeting, The Leader, i.e., the person with the biggest title, introduces a new initiative to the leadership team; even better the leadership team develops this new initiative as a group. Every one is excited and ready to go. In my experience that’s when the real leaders of the organization make their presence felt. They are the ones who, in the midst of all the day-to-day tasks that have to be done, bring the new idea into reality. Meanwhile other department heads make half-hearted attempts or none at all. Now, in most organizations, The Leader has ways to encourage and compel implementation, but true success or failure is dependent on the number of people who choose (an important word) to find ways to move the new initiative forward. True success also depends on the number of people who are creative in fitting implementation into their areas of responsibility. Finally, true success depends on follower/leaders who let The Leader know when the ideas are not working in the real world and make helpful suggestions to adapt the concepts to make them work.

Leadership is a partnership. It takes leaders and followers working together in the situation in which they find themselves for good leadership to exist. That’s why for me, while it is interesting to study great leaders, if in that study you don’t pay attention to the situation and the other members of the organization, you will never have a true picture of leadership. As Lao-Tzu says in his famous 17th verse of the Tao Te Ching,

“The great leader speaks little.
He never speaks carelessly.
He works without self-interest and leaves no trace.
When all is finished, the people say, 'We did it ourselves.'”

And they are correct.

Take care,

Gage

This translation of the Tao Te Ching comes from Wayne Dyer's Change Your Thoughts, Change Your Life: Living the Wisdom of the Tao

Stepped On Anyone's Toes Lately?

This past week I taught a leadership workshop called The Leadership Dance. I start this workshop by dividing the participants into small groups and asking them to write down their responses to the words leader and follower. They have only one minute for each word. I’ve done this exercise many times and of course there are differences among the groups, but there are more similarities. For example, the ‘leader’ lists have mostly positive words and the ‘follower’ lists have more negative words. Similarly, the ‘leader’ lists are almost always longer than the ‘follower’ lists. I ask participants to discuss the ideas and issues that caught their attention as they listened to the various lists. There are many conclusions to be drawn and nuances to be discussed and most groups do an excellent job of identifying them.

However, there are two concepts that usually fall to me to point out. The first is the fact that there are rarely any negative words on the leader list, but there are negative kinds of leadership. In a class on leadership the paradigm seems to be ‘leader equals good’ even though we all can list examples of leaders who led their followers over a cliff or leaders/bosses who are toxic and make it miserable to be part of the organization. There is a negative side to leadership and even the most good-hearted leader has to face the reality of the harm they can cause if they aren’t careful.

The second concept is the ‘leader’ list itself. There are variations of course, but those are just details. The aggregate list is a list of positive attributes that are just a little bit short of a job description that reads “faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound, …” The reality is that most leaders are human beings who can’t quite live up to the level that we tend to expect of leaders, at least not every day!would be different now.

And that’s one of the points the workshop is designed to teach - our expectations of leaders can be unreasonable. The reality is that leaders can’t dance alone. To be a great leader one needs great followers. And of course, the converse is true - it’s hard to be a great follower when you don’t have a strong leader. By the end of the workshop, that idea of leadership as a partnership has become very clear to participants. In fact one of my favorite comments from an earlier workshop was by a participant who said the list of words he would use to describe followers

On the dance floor, the leader starts with the left foot and the follower starts with the right foot. This minimizes the problem of stepping on each other's toes. In our leadership world, our words reflect our ideas and can determine our steps. If you find yourself unhappy with the leaders or the followers in your organization, maybe you should take a take a look at your ‘lists’. Do your words reflect unreasonable expectations of a leader? Are you seeing followers as subordinate? Dancing and Leading - both work best as partnerships and both take patience and attention. Stepped on any toes lately?

Forgiveness in the Leadership Dance

One of the skills we talk about with new supervisors or committee chairs is the skill of delegation. It can be one of the toughest things we have to do as leaders – to acknowledge that we alone are not responsible for the success of our organizational endeavors. We truly can’t do it all. We have to depend on others. In our leadership dance, we have to let go of our partner’s hand and trust that they know the steps.

When we delegate, we are not only handing off a task, we are sharing the responsibility and we have to trust in another’s ability and their willingness to do what is needed to complete that task. When we delegate, we have to be willing to allow for different ideas about the best way to accomplish the task, we have to be willing to give the other person space to be creative, and we have to be willing to understand that mistakes may happen.

Understanding that mistakes will happen is important for leaders, but it is also necessary for every member of a group. Michael McCullough, professor of psychology at the University of Miami puts it this way, “…one of the ingredients you have to have to get individuals to cooperate with each other is a tolerance for mistakes.” I had never really thought of it this way before, but it makes sense, doesn’t it?

McCullough goes on to say, “Sometimes I’m going to let you down….And if you take each of those mistakes as the last word about my cooperative disposition, you might just give up and so no cooperation gets done. So, really our ability to cooperate with each other and make things happen that we can’t do on our own is undergirded by an ability to forgive each other for occasional defects and mistakes.”*

Therefore, as leaders not only do we need to learn to delegate, we need to pay attention to the way we respond to mistakes, and we need to foster a willingness among all members of the group to tolerate mistakes - the mistakes of others, their own mistakes and those of the leader. On the other hand, we also need to set high standards for performance and hold people accountable for poor performance. Yet another paradox in our leadership dance: We have to find ways to lead our partners to excellence while understanding that they may make missteps along the way. Accountability and forgiveness - two challenging, contradictory, and essential skills we all need for the leadership dance.

Take care,

Gage

*quote from Einstein's God: Conversations about Science and the Human Spirit, by Krista Tippett. I heard it this morning on Tippett’s NPR show ‘Speaking of Faith.’

Putting your best foot forward

Most first lessons in ballroom dance begin the same way - the leader, traditionally a man, learns to start on the left foot and the follower, traditionally a woman, learns to start on the right foot. This very basic concept is of critical importance to the health and safety of the dancers’ toes and essential in the development of a smoothly functioning partnership. Those first lessons set up what seems to be a very rigid, hierarchical, and traditional leadership dynamic – one leader who always leads and one follower who always follows with ‘back leading’ by the follower a serious faux pas. The leader is assigned full responsibility for success.

But as is true with many things, initial impressions are misleading. The reality is that this pairing is a true partnership. Each partner has a specific role, but both are essential to the success of the whole. The strongest most talented leader in the world can only go so far with a follower who doesn’t want to dance. And the better a follower can follow, the better the leader can lead and the smoother the dance will become. And, of course, the opposite is also true – a talented follower won’t look good with a leader who only knows two or three basic steps and never gives followers a chance to reach their full potential as a dancer.

As the dancers learn more, it becomes even more complex. Sometimes the leader leads, but sometimes the leader’s role is to get out of the follower’s way. In that situation, followers have to know what to do on their own within the structure provided. Sometimes the leader provides the momentum for moving around the dance floor. However, there are situations for which the follower must provide that energy and if that transition of responsibility isn’t smooth, progress stutters. Dancing is truly a partnership; it is not just a leader leading and a follower following.

And the ideas hold true away from the dance floor. Think about your organizations and their leaders and followers. Identify a department or committee, whatever makes sense in that organization and analyze the ‘footwork’ of the members. Are the leaders and followers in step or are they both trying to start on the left foot? Does the leader give clear directions, help the followers know what they need to do, and guide them in learning new moves? What about the followers? Do they take responsibility for their roles and provide energy and momentum to support the partnership or are they waiting to be pushed around the floor?

Great followers make a good leader better just as great leaders lift followers to new heights. The responsibility for success in our organizations belongs to each of us no matter our title or our role. The responsibility for momentum and forward progress belongs to all of us. Our dancing and our organizations work best when we use the best talents of everyone no matter what role they have. Remember “Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did, but she did it backwards and in high heels.”* Now that's putting the best foot forward.

Keep dancing,

Gage

*I've found this quote attributed to Faith Whittlesey, Ann Richards and Annonymous.